Sports business CEO predicts divide between SEC and rest of college football

Nobody knows exactly how college football will be structured down the line, but that conversation is once again at the forefront of the sport after last week’s House settlement opened the door for college athletes to be paid directly by the schools they play for.

One prominent sports business executive envisions a stark divide between how schools in the SEC will handle college football’s new world order, and how the rest of the country will address the matter.

Appearing on The Varsity podcast with Puck’s John Ourand, TurnkeyZRG CEO Len Perna described what he predicts will be a future dispute over collective bargaining with college athletes. The result? SEC schools competing in one league. Everyone else competing in the other.

“The schools in the SEC have a lot of politics wrapped around not bargaining with a union of student athletes. There’s a lot of history around right-to-work states and the boards of those SEC schools,” Perna told Ourand. “I don’t think that the SEC will ever really be comfortable with collective bargaining with college football players. But I am very confident that schools in the Northeast, the Midwest, all throughout the Big Ten region and out West, will land on collective bargaining as a way to create a package of work rules that govern the transfer of talent—the transfer portal, a salary floor, a salary cap—all the things that create competitive balance in pro sports. I think that schools in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West will wind up playing in one league that has collective bargaining, and schools in the South will play in a separate league that won’t have collective bargaining.

“Ultimately, they’re going to have different cost structures because the schools with collective bargaining will be able to budget plan and predict their costs,” he continued. “And the schools in the South that don’t have collective bargaining will be in a perpetual free agent marketplace being driven by college football agents that will be driving up the cost every year. Those two leagues will look so different that I think the wedge issue is not a media issue. I think it’s a collectively bargained issue.”

Last year, Perna and other big shot sports executives spearheaded a plan to professionalize college football with 72 teams divided into 12 six-team divisions constructed by region and historic rivalries. The league would treat players as employees, and leverage its consolidation to gain an upper hand in media rights negotiations, thus generating more revenue than the current fragmented structure.

But now, he thinks that proposal was premature. Perna did not foresee political differences in the southeastern United States impacting the idea as much as it likely would.

Will his prediction ultimately come true? Who’s to say! Nobody truly knows what kind of structure college football will ultimately settle on. But for the sake of fans, hopefully it will include all of the nation’s best teams.